At 11:38 AM 7/21/2003, Andrew Thomas wrote: >Of course.... I apologize - I had meant to include that. Here it is, the actual >script is quite long so I've pared it down some to try and isolate the problem. This >is the whole script now and it is still having the same problem.
I'm the most newbie Perler in the world, so I hope I'm not speaking out of turn here... ... but instead of this... >while(<READFILE>) { > > $string = <READFILE>; > > $string =~ /^(\w+-*\w* *\w*, \w+)\|(\d+)\|(\d+)|/; > $patientName = $1; > > $studyID = $2; > > $dateOfBirth = $3; > > print WRITEFILE $patientName, $studyID, $dateOfBirth; >} Have you tried this? while (<READFILE>) { my $string = $_; #opening a line my @patientinfo = split (/ | /, $string); my $patientName = $patientinfo[0]; my $studyID = $patientinfo[1]; my $dateOfBirth = $patientinfo[2]; print WRITEFILE "$patientName, $studyID, $dateOfBirth \n"; } ... since you've got each item on a line, and you've got a common delimiter, it just seems like it would be easier to go line-by-line, split the line along the common delimiter and just grab what you want that way. ... but I'm a huge Perl newbie so there may be something really obvious I'm missing here! Tara -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]